Oriental or Asian?

[Guest]

A friend recently implied that I shouldn't refer to people as "Oriental," stating I should use the word "Asian." Well, to me, all Orientals are Asian, but not all Asians are Oriental. I use the term Asian to refer to anyone from the continent of Asia, be they Israeli, Arab, Indian, or Uzbeki, whereas an Oriental comes from the Orient, or Far East (China, Japan, and so forth). How do you guys use these words?

[Rick Munroe]

(from dictionary.com):

 

"Asian is now strongly preferred in place of Oriental for persons native to Asia or descended from an Asian people. The usual objection to Oriental - meaning eastern - is that it identifies Asian countries and peoples in terms of their location relative to Europe. However, this objection is not generally made of other Eurocentric terms such as Near and Middle Eastern. The real problem with Oriental is more likely its connotations stemming from an earlier era when Europeans viewed the regions east of the Mediterranean as exotic lands full of romance and intrigue, the home of despotic empires and inscrutable customs. At the least these associations can give Oriental a dated feel, and as a noun in contemporary contexts (as in the first Oriental to be elected from the district) it is now widely taken to be offensive. However, Oriental should not be thought of as an ethnic slur to be avoided in all situations. As with Asiatic, its use other than as an ethnonym, in phrases such as Oriental cuisine or Oriental medicine, is not usually considered objectionable."

[nate_sf]

I had an Asian friend back in college who used to say, "Rugs are Oriental, not people!" I agree with Rick, Oriental as a ethnic description has fallen out of usage and ends up sounding dated or even ignorant, even if that's not the person's intention. I think in the U.S. at least, Asian is the preferred term.

 

My friends from India prefer to be described as Indian, although this gets confused with Native American, so you end up hearing people say things like, "do you mean India Indian or Native American?"

 

I'm not sure about the Middle East. Two people I know from Iran describe themselves as Persian, but that's also to differentiate themselves from what Iran has become.

 

It's hard to know the rules and they change over time, so asking can't hurt.

[VaHawk]

Lord, where does the lunacy end?? I think Rick, gave a great answer that I'm sure my pathetic input could not enhance.

 

Yeah, pc wise Asian refers to anyone from Turkey to Japan and the Pacific Islands. But let's get real as far as general usage goes. Whether the term is Asian or Oriental, to me and imo, most of my fellow "ugly Americans" it connotates peoples from either far eastern or southeastern Asia (i.e. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Korea, Japan, Myanar, Mongolia). This is not to be confused with the Pacific Islanders from the Phillipines, Indonesia, etc., nor is it to be confused with the sub-continent of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. And don't confuse the term with those western Asians as most of us refer to them as Turkish, Uzbeki, Israeli, Persian or Arabic.

 

Dumb assed westerners with all their silly labels! Or should we call them occidentals (nah, that's a petroleum company isn't it?). Occidental and Oriental have been around for centuries and basically refer to western (not eastern) Europe and the far eastern part of Asia respectively. From the beginning nothing offensive was intended and imo, nothing is meant to be currently offensive!

 

How f**king silly does it have to get??? Are Russians and Turks European or Asian, as both countries span two continents? What about American as that spans many countries over two continents!

 

Sorry to rant, but labels are so f**king silly and meaningless and are used mainly to segregate and to propigate divisiness and hatred. I personally prefer the term earthlings, as at least that will bring us all together to fight them thar aliens from outer space. Microbe life from Mars will be dug up and invade Earth from all those latest space adventures!

[Guest rampo]

I know of no Asians who refer to themselves as Orientals - it pretty much went out vogue around the same time that the term "colored people" did - and haven't really heard the term used much since the 1960s except by people like my late grandmother or old racist queens who used the variant slur "Ornamentals." In Europe the term Asian seems to be applied more broadly, including Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, etc. In the US, the term Asian is usually applied to people from Southeast and East Asia (including the Philippines).

[eastbayguy]

>A friend recently implied that I shouldn't refer to people as

>"Oriental," stating I should use the word "Asian."

 

Lately, I've been following the rule of "Us" to refer to, well, Us and "them" for all others who aren't us.

 

:+

 

--EBG

[pierrot]

I know that Asian is the preferred term by many formerly "Orientals" now. All the same, the term does not really describe the people it is meant to, since Asian is correctly applied to people from Asia, not just from East Asia. In all the years "Oriental" was considered acceptable, I never thought of it as pejorative, nor did I ever hear it used in a pejorative manner. As PC has exploded with every group, ethnic and otherwise, claiming discrimination at any hint of a reference to their existence as a group, rationality sometimes goes out the window. So there's a constant migration from one term to another to test people's pc quotient. The most egregious example is the ever-changing term for colored/Negro/black/African-Americans. There's no doubt African-Americans have a history of terrible discrimination. But other than "colored", which is literally silly (we're all colored), and which has clear connections with the Jim Crow era, none of the other terms seem necessarily pejorative to me. To show how silly the moving sands of these terms are, the pc term in French for the race in question is now "les blacks", the French having adopted the English word, just as it has been abandoned here. I don't suppose "les African Americans" could ever work there, since the blacks in France are clearly not American, but you never know.

It's all become over the top. I think we should settle on a term that is properly descriptive and logical, and agree not to be offended. As for myself, gay/queer/fag/homosexual, whatever.

[RM]

I don't know why the French shouldn't start using 'les African American." Several times I've read the term "African American" to describe all "black" people, even those who live in Africa and have never been to America.

[Candyman]

Rick, we didn't know you were so PC. It must be those subliminal messages on the records you are listing to. :o

[+ Charlie]

The simplest way around this semantic morass is to call those who were formerly designed Oriental "East Asians".

[Guest bollocks]

My Oriental friends and acquaintances all prefer the term Asian. Oriental is etymologically correct, while Asian is actually something of an insult: the Greeks referred to the "babarians" who lived in Asia Minor as Asians and looked disparagingly upon them.

[Rick Munroe]

>Rick, we didn't know you were so PC.

 

Well, if "PC" means "penis connoisseur," then yeah, I'm PC. Btw, I didn't write that post! Doesn't anyone see the quotation marks? Sheesh. :o

[Guy Fawkes]

I was verbally abused on this issue by a white guy in San Francisco.

 

At one point, I spend a significant amount of time in the Pacific Rim. So I asked a friend who is a very traditional Japanese gentlemen. He thought that the "Oriental Rug" comment was PC bullshit, and that he's personally insulted when he's referred to as an "Asian" but doesn't mind "Oriental". He prefers the term "Japanese".

 

--Daddy

[Guest DevonSFescort]

>I asked a friend who is a very traditional

>Japanese gentlemen. He thought that the "Oriental Rug"

>comment was PC bullshit, and that he's personally insulted

>when he's referred to as an "Asian" but doesn't mind

>"Oriental". He prefers the term "Japanese".

 

This makes intuitive sense to me. As I understand it, to a large extent there is much more of a Pan-Asian identity among people of Asian descent in multicultural societies like ours in which they are a minority than in the "mother countries" themselves. (Many Japanese, in particular, are notoriously racist towards any non-Japanese and even against Japanese people who were born and raised overseas.) This has to do with commonalities in how they are perceived and treated by the majority ("They all look alike to me") and with the pragmatic need to pool their numbers together in order to exercise any political power. To some extent the growth of regional trading blocs has caused the Pan-Asian identity to show up in geopolitical politics (remember the talk of "Asian values" by Malaysian and Singaporean leaders in the 90s?), but I suspect this is concentrated mostly among the political elites and is primarily a pragmatic response to the economic power of the Americans and the Europeans. In a sense, "Asians" are only Asians vis-a-vis white people.

 

I think this phenomenon is replicated among other minority groups. It is not unusual for a black man in America to view the whole continent of Africa, and not necessarily a specific country, as his point of origin, but there is not a high level of harmony among Africans themselves (witness Rwanda). In some cases this disunity has been amplified by the former colonial powers themselves. (Also, black Americans have reported traveling to Africa to embrace their roots, only to discover that as far as Africans were concerned they weren't "fellow African brothers" but simply Americans.

 

And many Latinos have pointed out that the term "Latino" points to a "group" of people so heterogeneous that it can hardly be called a coherent group. Still, in the United States, Latinos of differing nationalities probably have much more of a common experience than they do south of the border.

[Guest JakeM4M]

My understanding is that "oriental" is now used to describe inanimate objects, "asian" is used to describe people.

 

Jake

[Guest]

That's the best idea I've heard, actually. I can't imagine anyone would find the term "East Asian" offensive. I think I'll start using it. I just feel silly referring to someone as "Asian" which encompasses areas as diverse as Ankara to Colombo to Vladivostok. I'm not sure there have been any East Asians responding to this thread. I have a lot of black friends and none of them is offended by the term black. I only have one good East Asian friend (Korean), and he refers to East Asians as Oriental. I'm not sure if terms such as "African-American" don't simply reflect white peoples' discomfort of the term "black"?

[HotdadENYC]

Devon, is there a point to your reply? Or are you just passing off

sociological babble?

[HotdadENYC]

We could probably save a lot of valuable time, and prevent any PC

crises, if we just ask the other person what their nationality is, and perhaps how they like to be referred to. Insofar as what the

REAL purpose of this site is, I'm quite sure that that question would

go a long way towards getting to the ultimate point.....that is, are

we physically compatible.

[Guest DevonSFescort]

>Devon, is there a point to your reply?

 

Yes. I was offering a possible explanation for why it might be the case that a Japanese man might not like being called Asian but a Japanese American might call himself Asian (which, you'll notice if you read the post I responded to, was directly relevant to what was being discussed). Is there a point to YOUR reply?

[Justice]

I believe that the term "Oriental" has fallen out of favor. I have several friends who are either Chinese-American or Japanese-American. Some of the know each other, but most of them don't. They all refer to themselves as Asians.

 

 

Justice